Museum Value a Cure for Object Bulimia
Professor Janne Vilkuna, University of Jyväskylä
Archives, libraries and museums are called together memory organizations or heritage organizations. Museums differ from the others in their collecting because the objects are not standardized (nor digital) but vary from ships and aeroplanes to stamps and pinned insect specimens. The collecting is neither automatic. In other words it does not base on official acts, degrees or instructions.
Because everything cannot not be preserved those responsible of the augmentation of the collections must decide what is kept and remembered and what is left and forgotten. Still one and probably the most fatal problem for memory organization, especially museums, are object bulimia. It means that the memory of the organisation is slowly destroyed because the growth of the collections is unsustainable. So far the only cure for this lethal disease is the so far theoretical concept of museum value or museality.
Museum value correlate often with information value: the object itself is not worthy but the information it carries. An object does not carry automatically information but someone must add the knowledge (the context) to it. Both the possibility and the evaluation of this adding are hard with the traditional registration process in museums. So something new is needed. What? A flexible and both economically accessible collection and information management system for the museums and then in use as accessible as possible for the professionals and the public.
And exactly this is one important target of the 3D-Bridge project: “to develop tools of new technology based on an open source policy for the research and preservation of cultural heritage.”
